Home
Tracy L. Templeton. 82 x 40 in. Digital, gold leaf, book board, foil. 2020.
Inspired by the exhibition, ANTHEM: Expressions of Canadian Identity, I delved deep into alternative book forms, their construction, and folding to best entwine language and image, bridging print installation with deconstructed book traditions into unique platforms for exhibition. By examining the geography of the southern Saskatchewan landscape in which I was raised, I carefully crafted text and distilled imagery, not pointing towards any one narrative, but rather the prairie’s remarkable mutability — its ability to never be viewed from a static viewpoint, moving and evolving through rain, drought, snow, and the influence of one's intimate interaction within it.
From the incremental, such as the nightly drive home on a familiar grid road, to the ephemeral movements of the northern lights at dusk, landscape intertwines with personal ethos creating an intensity of topophilia — a term coined by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, whom I repeatedly reference, to describe a sense of place intertwined with cultural identity.